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Article Excerpt
THE ADVENT OF THE SUICIDE BOMBER AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON during the past decade and a half has vastly increased our interest in but only marginally improved our understanding of martyrdom. The word remains as mysterious, hard to define, and highly explosive as ever. Modern scholars much prefer the term "self-sacrifice" to martyrdom largely because it reveals the complexities of the subject: to what extent does the self gain by the act of sacrifice and is the sacrifice individualistic or communal and its motivation economic, political, religious, or social? Martyrdom, in contrast, is, in its strictest sense, the witnessing unto death of divine truth.
Self-sacrifice may be a better analytical tool for the study of martyrdom but it places the focus more on the actors, the martyrs themselves, their motives and personalities, and less on the society that defines and awards the title of martyr. Martyrdom is as much a reward granted by the community as it is a display of courage and endurance achieved by the individual in the face of torture and execution. As Saint Augustine often said, "it is not the penalty which makes a martyr but the cause" (Augustine, 1953: 35). Since this article is a historical survey of how the willingness to die for a cause has over the centuries tended to lose its religious orientation and increase its political potency, thereby muddying both its meaning and function, it seems best to stick to the historic term "martyr," stemming from the Greek word "witness," if only because it connotes--better than self-sacrifice--the interplay between those who make the sacrifice and the society that establishes the cause and that accords them their name.
All societies have their martyrs, those semi-legendary spiritual heroes whose style of death embodies the values most dear to the societies they represent. Those values were expressed in religious terms because originally all authority was seen as stemming from the divine and the welfare of the state was closely allied to the welfare of the gods. For most of the Western world the early Christian martyrs remain the historic prototype for all who would make "death count for life" (Erikson, 1969: 197). The blood of the early Christian martyrs was far more than the seed of the Christian church; it was the stuff from which myths and fantasies were spun. Medieval Europe regarded "stern saints and tortured martyrs" as far more meaningful role models than militant barons and armored knights because a martyr's exquisite suffering and death made, as Saint Cyprian asserted, "life more complete" and led to glory and life eternal (Cyprian, 1869: 235).
The early Christians derived both their use and theory of martyrdom from the story of the death of Socrates and the Judaic legends of Eleazar and the Maccabean brothers. The crucifixion was ever before their eyes and they sought to emulate in their own deaths the agony of the dying Christ upon the cross. Saint Cyprian was explicit: the martyr in his prolonged torture and death stood "immovable, the stronger for his suffering," resolved that in the "brutality of the executioner Christ Himself is suffering more in proportion to what he suffers" (Cyprian, 1869: 233). The early Christians viewed themselves as warriors in the endless battle between good and evil, a battle in which the devil did not limit himself to the pollution and corruption of tyrants and human institutions but was working from within, seeking to defile the immortal souls of men and women. They sought to nourish and advertise a new concept of the divine, one that had nothing to do with a pantheon of earth- and ocean-bound gods or household deities but with a cosmic force, a tiny spark of which was implanted in each human soul.
Christians battled not with Rome; in their eyes they remained loyal citizens of the empire. Nor were they defending a militant church that demanded absolute and unconditional allegiance; no such institution had as yet taken shape. Instead, their agony was a demonstration of an internalized faith in a merciful and rewarding God in which death was the absolute proof of their victory over Satan and his hordes. Saint Cyprian stated the case in its most brutal form when he wrote that the hissing of our bodies, scorched with "red-hot plates, is not for the sake of seeking our blood, but for the sake of trying us" (Cyprian, 1869: 242). They died not to reform the world but to save their souls and prove their faith in the face of overwhelming pain.
The early martyrs might not have been reformers in any social sense but they certainly regarded themselves as revealers, as "God boxes" and specially ordained instruments through which the Holy Spirit reverberated throughout the earth and heralded God's ultimate purpose. God's truth, they knew, was better served by actions than by words and the greatest act was to die for the truth. Quite consciously, the early martyrs turned their ordeal and triumph over the devil into a spectacle directed against unbelievers. "So great," wrote Saint Cyprian, "is the virtue of martyrdom, that by its means even he who has wished to slay you is constrained to believe" (Cyprian, 1869: 241). Tertullian, the most outspoken second-century advocate of martyrdom, assured the pagan world that "your tortures accomplish nothing, though each is more refined than the last. Rather, they are an enticement to our religion. We become more numerous every time we are hewn down by you; the blood of the martyrs is [the] seed [of the church]." Who is not stirred, he added, at the sight of such endurance to pain "to enquire what is really beneath the surface? And who, when he has enquired, does not approach us" and "join us in procuring God's grace?" (Tertullian, 1950: 125-26).
Although Christian martyrdom appears on the surface to be a defensive act to secure the truth of a new kind of faith against a powerful pagan majority--a majority determined either to exterminate what it regarded as a social-political-religious evil or to force Christians to respect and sacrifice to the gods that had made the empire great and given it law and security--under the surface lay a political power struggle recognized by both sides. Tertullian was well aware of the political implications of martyrdom when he assured the martyrs that "you gain power when you are before the eyes of men" (Tertullian, 1959: 294). On the pagan side, few Roman would have disagreed with Cicero's estimation that the "disappearance of piety towards the [pagan] gods will entail the disappearance of loyalty and social union among men" (Wilken, 1984: 58). From the start, embedded in martyrdom was a political face that in the long run was even more revolutionary than its religious profile because God's new kingdom, for which the martyr was so willing to die, combined both this world and the next.
EVENTUALLY, CHRISTIANS AND PAGANS CHANGED PLACES, PAGANS becoming martyrs to their declining faith and Christian persecutors, enjoying the comforts of power and accepting as divinely ordained the realities of lavish wealth for the few and poverty and slavery for the many. The seeds of the martyrs blossomed into a hierarchical and aggressive church that paralleled, rivaled, and eventually replaced the old Roman Empire. By the fifth century most Romans did not "even know the names of the emperors and their generals," but everyone knew "the names of the martyrs better than those of their most intimate friends" (Brown, 1981: 50). A church-universal was taking shape with its own soldier-martyrs who willingly died as it expanded to encompass all of Europe.
Throughout most of this period church and state remained intimately allied, both in close accord as to the proper social and religious values in society. The first spectacular rift between church and state came in the twelfth century over the behavior of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the century's most popular martyr. Should he be called a proper martyr-saint or a traitor to his king?. He died in a power struggle between church and state, his assassination the result of the rash words of Plantagenet Henry II--"What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk" (Barlow, 1986: 235)--and he was hacked to pieces by armed knights while standing at his high alter in his cathedral church of Canterbury. He was known to be a "haughty, rapacious, violent and cruel" cleric (Anonymous II, 1879: 135-36) who defended ecclesiastical liberties, defined not as freedom of worship but as fiscal, judicial, and organizational privileges; should such a man be numbered among the martyrs and granted sainthood? The bishop of Hereford posed the question within months of the archbishop's death: "Shall we count him as a...
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